Flat sheets of corrugated paperboard, typically referred to as blanks, have been used for many years as the starting material to form containers. Corrugated paperboard can take the form of multi-layer sheet material comprised of two sheets of liner bonded to a central corrugated layer of medium. Given a basic size requirement specified by the customer, industry standards, and the preference for low cost, paperboard container manufacturers strive to provide structural stacking strength with a minimal amount of corrugated paperboard, or any other material that may be used instead of corrugated paperboard.
In shipping and displaying products, particularly in a retail setting, it is also desirable to have a container which is easy to pack, sturdy and suitable for display at a retail site. For example, it is beneficial to have a container configured to be convertible from a shipping configuration to a display configuration with minimal or no effort, preferentially permitting the container to be placed directly upon a shelf or floor display and itself serve as the display tray for the consumer product in the retail environment.
Such convertible containers represent a challenge in that they must be readily convertible into a form presentable to customers, while at the same time maintaining certain shipping performance characteristics, suitable for the shipment of non-self-supporting or even fragile products. Prior attempts at providing a displayable shipping container may suffer from one or more disadvantages. For example, prior displayable shipping containers often are either lacking in the necessary shipping performance characteristics or, in order to provide such performance, have structural elements that remain in position after converting to a display configuration that make access to the product inconvenient.
Other displayable shipping containers are labor intensive to manufacture, assemble, or convert. And still other containers require excessive materials or, in some cases, extraneous components (e.g., a tie or a wrap) to secure a lid on a body of the container. Once converted to a display configuration, many displayable shipping containers often also include rough, unfinished, jagged, and uneven surfaces in prominent locations that are somewhat unsightly and do not provide the appeal of a neat, clean and presentable display.
Because of the industry push to minimize the amount of corrugated paperboard or other starting material used to form a container and because of the desire to display a shipping container that is free of excessive structural elements, prior displayable containers tend to be somewhat weak, and in certain situations they can deform when stacked.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a display tray that addresses many, if not all, of these disadvantages.